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“A good book is one that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it.” –John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (1978)

After some forty years in the classroom, teaching about writing and literature, telling THEM about so many greats… On and on I would go, lecture after great lecture. Book list and book list. Reading assignment and reading assignment. And, of course, test after test–to say nothing of those research papers and thesis projects. I was the Giver, with all the pearls in the basket to hand out, like so many of my good handouts. (I wonder how many of those made it home?)

They all supposed or assumed I liked everything we ever read for class. Often times I was teaching what I was told to teach from the curriculum, not what was my choice, what I “liked.” (Forbidden to teach The Catcher in the Rye? Yes. And I Am the Cheese? That, too.) Yet I did have opinions.

Nevertheless, I was doing my job–which included NOT speaking personals in the classroom. Then as I became older, the classrooms became a bit friendlier (or did I?). I became more pensive about my own education, recalling my being a student in high school and in college. I did less professing, more suggesting. Hah! It took me only twenty years to “get it.” These were (some of) the best of times (I admit, I still did get a lousy evaluation occasionally that set me aback).

Picture of Young Professor 1983

So I began to write about reading. And studying. I even began to write a blog, this blog, about the importance of reading–

“Adults like to talk about their reading…to force the mind to recollect forgotten but important memories of how one became a reader.” –G. Robert Carlsen and Anne Sherrill, Voices of Readers: How We Come to Love Books, 1988.

I had written how I became a follower/reader/addict of the writings of Joseph Epstein whom I began reading so many years ago (more than 35!) who “taught” me about those “boring” books of the “masters” that are better left unread– “Why I Read”….

I questioned my education and whether I was an educated person, recalling my formative years and those who tried to influence my reading habits. Was I an educated person? Did my reading Ben-Hur do anything for me? (That was a book given to me by my eighth grade teacher.) I read the Bible once completely, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Cervantes, terrible romances, existentialists, Shakespeare.

I was reading what others thought was good for me. What were my first books? Spot and Jane. I began a love life with books and reading: comic books, library books, and Sunday funnies. My favorite comics (now expensive collectibles) were about war. I was nine when the Korean War started. My reading of everything about it (even on bubble gum cards) led to a life-long affair with war history. By the time I began to baby-sit for the neighbor (whose husband was a former Flying Tiger pilot), I was a sixth grader reading The Junior Classics:

My mom had bought them all beautifully bound, and had them placed, displayed, in the red-leatherette credenza we had forever. (She must have paid a fortune for them.) After I had the babies fed, bathed, and bedded, I went into the living room and read my classic stories: about Camelot, giants, heroes, myths.

Throughout high school, I read from those required lists–but took a charmingly delightful side-trip, with James Joyce, Graham Greene, Mortimer Adler, and others when I joined the Book Club. Afterwards, the mainstream reading, through college and graduate school, was really more, and more intense, for this “English Major”: Shakespeare and Milton; Whitman and Dickinson; Thoreau and Emerson. And? I became a teacher. One of those teachers… Some Great Teachers: Growing Up with Reading https://memoriesofatime.blog/2015/12/23/some-great-teachers-growing-up-with-reading/

“You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.” –Dr. Seuss

Yes: On my own I worked myself into Darwin, Chardin, and Eliade. I have learned. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn–I return to it, and should more often. It’s about me, not about some other kid. And the famous epiphanous beach scene by James Joyce, which moved me for all time, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I read (present). I read (past). I have read (present perfect). I am reading… I have surrounded myself with books for most of my life. And have much around me to read, if I am so moved. Like Sisyphus, I am happy.

Until quite recently, rather sedentary. Now I have to answer some questions. No slipping away, equivocating, hesitating– “Oh, there is time for the answers, Professor, but I think it would be best if you could write down your answers and get them to me whenever you get some free time.” I was the reader now, not the teacher, not the blogger, not The Great Professor (but, perhaps, the “confessor” confessing?). Someone “from out there” asked WHO? WHAT? WHY?

—WHO is your favorite author and what might be a favorite quotation by that author? Shakespeare may not be my “favorite” author, but my favorite play is his Othello. It is the best Shakespeare did–for human weakness, love, lust, tragedy, marriage, evil, friendship, jealousy, treachery–all condensed. It’s about a soldier who is not promoted, who plots to make his commanding officer jealous. The quotations from Shakespeare abound. From this play, one stands out that has surpassed “Chaos has come again!” It’s my favorite: The soldier says, “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; // It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock // The meat it feeds on…” Beware the green-eyed monster jealousy! To me, this is right up there with “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!”

–WHAT is your favorite book and the main theme of that book? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I first read in high school then much later in graduate school. The character Stephen Dedalus, a young man, by James Joyce, had to leave family, church, and country to grow into manhood–to question the taught values–then to accept or reject them, but not to take them without question. I believe I am Dedalus, the Questioner.

—Do you have a favorite quotation? What does that quotation mean to you and WHY is it your favorite? John Milton, “On His Blindness” (1655). “They also serve who only stand and wait.” WHEN I consider how my light is spent… “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I ask. God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. Thousands at his bidding speed and post o’er land and ocean without rest. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Milton lamented his blindness, and felt that he was not serving God the way he could be were he able to see. But those are doing their duty, awaiting their assignments, even simply by being around. I’ve felt that I have not always been able to be a do-er in many aspects of my life, but have been a follower, waiting to be invited or waiting to be told what to told. In other words, waiting is also a noble office.

So, The Grand Inquisitor Classroom Professor has been inquisited. No blood has been let. All proceeded painlessly. However, the process took time–and much thought, which I gave. Sometimes easy to say “Best 10” or “Top 5”; but more difficult to announce, “And the Award goes to…” Therefore, Dear Reader, Please answer the following…

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On September 24, 2015, Pope Francis became the first pope to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress. Dorothy Day was one of four Americans mentioned by the Pope in his speech to the joint session that included Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Merton. He said of Day: “Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”

Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897–November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert. She initially lived a bohemian lifestyle before gaining fame as a social activist after her conversion, and later became a key figure in the Catholic Worker Movement, earning a national reputation as a political radical. Some might perhaps deem her the most famous radical in American Catholic Church history.

In the 1930s, she worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combined direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. She did practice civil disobedience, which led at times to arrests, in 1955, 1957, and even in 1973 at the age of seventy-five.

As part of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, and served as its editor from 1933 until her death in 1980.

Day supported herself as a journalist, writing a gardening column for the local paper, the Staten Island Advance and features articles and book reviews for several Catholic publications, like Commonweal.

She wrote in her autobiography: “I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers?”

The Catholic Worker Movement

In 1932, Day met Peter Maurin, the man she always credited as the founder of the movement with which she is identified. Despite his lack of formal education, Maurin was a man of deep intellect and decidedly strong views, with a vision of social justice and its connection with the poor, partly inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. He provided Day with the grounding in Catholic theology of the need for social action they both felt.

The first issue of The Catholic Worker appeared on May 1, 1933, priced at one cent, and published continuously since then. It was aimed at those suffering the most in the depths of the Great Depression, “those who think there is no hope for the future,” and announced to them that “the Catholic Church has a social program…there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare.”

It was an unapologetic example of advocacy journalism. It provided coverage of strikes, explored working conditions, especially of women and blacks, and explicated papal teaching on social issues. Its viewpoint was partisan and stories were designed to move its readers to take action locally, for example, by patronizing laundries recommended by the Laundry Workers’ Union. Its advocacy of federal child labor laws put it at odds with the American Church hierarchy from its first issue. (Ironically, the paper’s principal competitor both in distribution and ideology was the Communist Daily Worker.)

In 1972, the Jesuit magazine America marked her 75th birthday by devoting an entire issue to Day and the Catholic Worker movement. The editors wrote: “By now, if one had to choose a single individual to symbolize the best in the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the last forty years, that one person would certainly be Dorothy Day.”

Day suffered a heart attack and died on November 29, 1980, and is buried in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island just a few blocks from the beachside cottage where she first became interested in Catholicism. Her many papers are housed at Marquette University along with many records of the Catholic Worker movement.

Much of her life in activism was fraught with controversy, Church versus anarchists, pacifism versus anarchism, respect for Castro and Ho Chi Minh, anti-Church and Franco. Yet despite all her works and writings, she and her life cannot be easily dismissed or hidden away. Her movement is a significant part of the cloth of American culture, of the spectrum of the American worker’s history, and is noted as part of her role in establishing non-violence as a Catholic principle: “the nonviolent witness of such figures as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King has had profound impact upon the life of the Church in the United States” as written in a May 1983 pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “The Challenge of Peace.”

In 1983, the Claretian Missionaries put forth publicly a proposal for her canonization. At the request of Cardinal John J. O’Connor, head of the diocese in which she lived, in March 2000, Pope John Paul II granted the Archdiocese of New York permission to open her cause, allowing her to be called a “Servant of God” in the eyes of the Catholic Church. As canon law requires, the Archdiocese of New York submitted this cause for the endorsement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which it received in November 2012. However, some members of the Catholic Worker Movement objected to the canonization process as a contradiction of Day’s own values and concerns. Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XVI, on February 13, 2013, in the closing days of his papacy, cited Day as an example of conversion. He quoted from her writings and said: “The journey towards faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless.”

Dorothy Day

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“A fingerprint in its narrow sense is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. Fingerprints are easily deposited on suitable surfaces (such as glass or metal or polished stone) by the natural secretions of sweat from the eccrine glands that are present in epidermal ridges. In a wider use of the term, fingerprints are the traces of an impression from the friction ridges of any part of a human hand.

“Deliberate impressions of fingerprints may be formed by ink or other substances transferred from the peaks of friction ridges on the skin to a relatively smooth surface such as a fingerprint card. Fingerprint records normally contain impressions from the pad on the last joint of fingers and thumbs, although fingerprint cards also typically record portions of lower joint areas of the fingers.

“Human fingerprints are detailed, nearly unique, difficult to alter, and durable over the life of an individual, making them suitable as long-term markers of human identity. They may be employed by police or other authorities to identify individuals who wish to conceal their identity, or to identify people who are incapacitated or deceased, as in the aftermath of a natural disaster.” [See Wikipedia for more material’]

Where is Thumbkin? Where is Thumbkin?
(Hide hands behind back)
Here I am! Here I am!
(Show L thumb, then R thumb)
How are you today, sir?
(Wiggle L thumb)
Very well, I thank you.
(Wiggle R thumb)
Run away, run away.
(Hide LH behind back, then RH)

[This is a song often sung in Head Start classes I taught, bringing memoriesofatime.]

This is my Thumbkin [my thumb].

This is a fingerprint identification chart.

History of MY LEFT THUMBKIN: SMASHED in a church door when I was a youngster in Chicago (with little memories of that pain). SMASHED in a friend’s car door while I was in college: “Good night. Thanks for the ride home.” SLAM! Car begins to pull away. “WAIT!” as I scream in pain, pounding on the passenger’s side window, Thumbkin still in the door. In the Emergency Room, I looked at the thumb twice the size as normal, bruised and blue and internally bleeding. But flattened. And the throbbing. Throbbing. Throbbing. “Scalpel.” Holes drilled into the nail. Pain and blood.

Later: August 1964: Rochester, Minnesota, Airport parking lot. Slipped, fell, and slid along asphalt, Thumbkin extended. ER: cleansing of bits and pieces of Minnesota, stitches, and awful drilling into the bruised and battered nail, throbbing. And throbbing. And throbbing. Young ER resident took an alcohol lamp, bent a paperclip, grabbed it with a forceps. Taking the red-hot paperclip, he pssit pssit pssit pssit pssit five holes into the nail, blood squirting and oozing. NO PAIN! “Just a trick I learned in med school.”

My fingerprints are on file. Or not…

I was first fingerprinted in the spring of 1963, for a government position: The U. S. Post Office [USPS]. Once more, in 1980, then in 2003–all for positions with public agencies. After retirement, I applied as a free-lancer, and once more needed to have my prints updated. “Mr. O’Neil, could you come with me, please.” I followed down the long hall in the administrative offices, in 2010, and was led into a small room. On a small table was a device I had never before seen. “You’ll have to insert your left thumb into that hole with the red light.” “Is there a problem?” “You don’t seem to have fingerprints. We need to do a deeper, thorough examination of your ridges, that’s all.” After some time, I was given the proper directions and allowed to leave. “But whatever happened to my prints?” I had asked before leaving. “Acid…”

My professional career began in 1963. I had a few hobbies–coin collecting, for one– but none like doing stained glass work, from 1990-2014, until my back “gave out”–and I could no longer lift and bend like before. I had to stop. An essential part of working with glass and solder is the use of acid flux.

Paste Flux

A flux (derived from Latin fluxus meaning “flow”) is a chemical cleaning agent, flowing agent, or purifying agent, for metal joining. Flux allows solder to flow easily on the working piece rather than forming beads as it would otherwise. Flux is usually, normally, applied with a brush, to the joints to be soldered.

Stained Glass Piece Soldered Restoration

But in the turning and moving of a glass piece being worked on, if the artist does not wear gloves, flux begins to work on the skin and, of course, the finger tips. Flux is an acid, and a poison.My fingertips would peel; I thought nothing of it. No pain. Just washed well. I did my best to take care, and did wear gloves as often as possible, but…

And that’s the real story of my thumb and fingerprints…

In the minds of some, however, there exists another story, one of fascination, intrigue, and cover and covert operations: That my forty-year teaching career concealed my true identity and sheltered my true profession: CIA Operative. How this story may have been initiated and by whom puzzles me.

I see no resemblance to any “secret agent.”

JIM

JASON

These pictures were taken many years ago, and I never remember telling stories to my boys who might have had over-active imaginations, with their Batman and Robin, and other hero-Super-hero themes in their lives. Why would I have told the kids about the CIA? Did someone else tell them? Well, that story–and the fingerprint issue–just needs to be put to rest once and for all. And that is that.

BTW: Here’s a picture of one of my favorite authors who, along with Robert Ludlum, did write good political intrigue fiction.

“Off and on for more than twenty years, I have been keeping a journal. One expects a famous writer to keep a journal,” wrote Aristides, the pen name for Joseph P Epstein, editor of The American Scholar, 1975-1997.

“The first function of a young writer’s journal: a place to grouse, a place to dramatize one’s condition in prose, and a place to bemoan the fact that, once again, this time in the instance of oneself, the world in its ignorance is failing to recognize another genius.”

“In my [current] journal…I have done my best to cease complaining and have taken as my motto the lines from the beer commercial that runs ‘I guess it doesn’t get much better than this.’”

“…to feature introspection and self-analysis…even in a journal has its limits.”

“Who needs this?…I suppose I alone do. Something in me impels me to record much I have thought, or experienced, or read, or heard.”

“I find keeping a journal quickens life; it provides the double pleasure of first living life and then savoring it through the formation of sentences about it.”

Graphomania: a writer’s disease “taking the form of simply being unable to put down the pen (the authorly equivalent to logorrhea). ‘Advanced’ stage takes the form of needing to write down everything because anything that hasn’t been written down isn’t quite real.”

“The graphomaniac’s slogan is ‘no ink, no life.’”

“I must confess that I do not write in my journal every day. But when I do write something in my journal, I feel rather more complete… Not that journal writing elevates me–it doesn’t, usually…”

“I do feel upon having made an entry in my journal as if I have done my duty, completed, in effect, an act of intellectual hygiene.”

“I do not often look into my journals; yet whenever I do, I am impressed by how much experience has slipped through the net of my memory.”

“I suspect that anyone who keeps a journal has to be something of a Copernican–he [or she] really must believe that the world revolves around himself [or herself].”

“Everything I have written is these journals is true–or at least as true as I could make it at the time I wrote it. Lying, as such, is not, I believe, a question in my journal.”

“I try, when writing in my journal, to keep in mind the twin truths that I am someone of the greatest importance to myself and that I am also ultimately insignificant. (This is not always so easily accomplished.)”

“Sometimes I am astonished at the items that find their way into this journal of mine.”

“I [once] wrote that John Wayne had become part of the furniture of [my] one’s life. The first half of one’s life, it strikes me, one fills up one’s rooms with such furniture; the second half, one watches this furniture, piece by piece, being removed.”

“My journal has served as a running inventory of my days, and I am pleased to have kept it.”

“Though we must live life forward, ‘Life can only be understood backward,’ wrote Kierkegaard. Yet a journal does provide backward understanding…a great aid in replaying segments of past experience, in running over important and even trivial events, in recollecting moods and moments otherwise lost to memory.”

“A journal is a simple device for blowing off steam, privately settling scores, clarifying thoughts, giving way to vanities, rectifying hypocrisies, and generally leaving an impression and record of your days.”

“When you are through with it, [and] when the time has come to leave this…earth, you can even pass the damn thing along to your yet unborn great-grandchildren.”

Like this:

Once upon a time, as the story goes, there were three bears, a Lorax, and seven dwarfs. They all planned to sit down on the forest lawn one late spring morning for a leisurely brunch, complete with honey, biscuits, green eggs and ham (this was a typical New Orleans Brennan’s-style meal), and some good apple pies baked by the old hag who also built gingerbread houses. Well, because of the whims of Thor and the other gods, the brunch party was called on account of rain. But they all lived happily ever after, for they knew behind every rain cloud there was a silver lining.

THE END.

SO IT GOES.

HEIGH, HO!

Narration is to entertain, by storytelling, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Mostly. There is FACTUAL narration and FICTIONAL narration. (Some get them mixed up.)

FACTUAL presents a sequence of events (and people involved) as they are, CONCERNED WITH TIME AND ACTION. The events have significance or meaning to the teller of the tale, even though he or she may not have been directly involved in the event (what I might know from a historical happening).

(Sometimes, though, narration or storytelling is used to make a point, or even to make an argument, as in a parable, a fable, or in a sermon [or at a political rally]). In telling, tellers capture and use DETAILS and organize and present with FEELINGS and EMOTIONS, yet ordering with reason-ableness. (A reader or listener wants to hear or read details that emotionally involve–“Yeah! That happened to me!”; details that are understandable; details that present a sense of time and past-ness to make it all ring true–memoriesofatime)

TELL A GOOD STORY. BE HONEST AND TRUE. PUT IT ALL IN GOOD ORDER: incidents, anecdotes, memories, nostalgics, milestones, autobiography, biography, family history.

Jean Piaget told some teachers once upon a time that most people usually do not reflect upon their lives–and maybe cannot–until they are 18 or 19. (He said some writers need to be taught how to reflect.)

Finally, once upon a time, the author Flannery O’Connor remarked that anybody who has survived childhood (the 18 or 19 mentioned by Piaget?) has enough information about life to last (to write about?) the rest of his or her days.

Like this:

“We’ve been playing games since humanity had civilization. There is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It’s so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.” — Jane McGonigal

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” — Albert Einstein

***

I hate games!

I don’t care whether they are intellectually or physically challenging: I simply hate them.

I have been a Player in this Game of Life. It’s a game, with winners and losers. And that “crap” about “it’s not about winning but how you play the game”? It’s crap! Otherwise, why keep score? Statistics? Population numbers? Win-Loss columns? Is that what Life is all about? Scoring?

So life is The Big Game, this life of ours. From beginning to end. Parameters.

When did it all begin? (Big Bang Game Theory?) LET THE GAME BEGIN!

Who set the rules? “RULE NUMBER ONE: Don’t eat the fruit from that tree over there!” And all amid them stood the Tree of life, / High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit / of Vegetable Gold; and next to Life / Our Death the Tree of Knowledge grew fast by, / Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill. [Paradise Lost, IV:218-22.] Was there a rule book for the participants? Too late! “Unfair!”

Does everyone get a chance to play? (“Many are called, but few are chosen”?) The strong/strongest survive–those picked for the team. But “some play by different rules” (“march to a different drummer?). The mystery of it all boggles my mind.

Boggle–I hate that game, especially the three-minute sand timer: “the sands of time run out.” Maybe the Whole of Life is Boggle? or maybe Monopoly? What game are we playing that is NOT physically or intellectually challenging?

From birth, I play Either/Or: Either breathe or not, crawl or not, walk or not. If I can move, I move on to the next plateau, the next level. (Flying is out of the question: I have to compete with gravity–and that is really some opponent, that Gravity Character!).

Most of this is out of my control, usually lucky or not. (Is 98% of my life really out of my hands, not under my control? Fate? Chance? Providence? Good or Bad Luck? Predestination?)

Oh, the Lucky Theory: Where was I born? On an island? In Canada? On a tectonic plate line? (A “fault” line? whose fault?) In a village in the Sudan? Oh, that Lucky Theory. So some have been dealt one hand better than another. Another Game of Life: Poker, Hearts, Go Fish (“Teach a man to fish…”). The metaphors, the symbols, the myths all reflect–or are–Game Theory in Life: kings, queens, jacks, spades, clubs, deuces, aces. And those Tarot Cards? Have you seen the movie The Red Violin?

I hate games. Chess? A beauty this is, with royalty, pawns, knights, and even a bishop or two. I was even in the high school chess club. I played on a miniature board with a classmate while we rode the “L” to school. I made a chess board for my boys. But I’ve had it with chess. And Battleship, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Husker Du, or HOOSKER DOO– whatever. I have outgrown Cops-n-Robbers, lost my Confederate soldier cap, never did the Cowboys-n-Indians thing, but Soldiers? Now THAT…

I was a regular in John Wayne’s squad–er, Sgt. Stryker’s squad: “You gotta learn right and you gotta learn fast. And any man that doesn’t want to cooperate, I’ll make him wish he had never been born.”

JOHN WAYNE aka SGT Stryker

I had the pluck. I had the skinned knees to show my battle damage as I played war games on the neighborhood sidewalks of Chicago. Not in the parks: Couldn’t be too far from home. Not too far from supper. Not out too late. Homework.

Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians (13.11), in that now-famous verse, that when he became a man, he wasn’t playing with the kids anymore. I can’t believe that: “…when I became a man, I put away childish things.” No, he didn’t stop playing. (I just bet he was a good soccer player!) He is saying that at the time he was serious about love. And life. But not that we couldn’t have fun. Nor shouldn’t have fun.

Subsequently, I accept Life. The Game of Life. I’ll play. I’m in. Deal me in. I hope I get a good hand. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I shall play my best. Besides, it’s not about winning and losing but about how I play the game anyhow, right? (Said that. Heard that so many times. That mantra.) I’ll keep my eyes on the prize, maybe getting into the semi-finals, for I know that “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

Along the way, I might even pick up a medal or two–or a ribbon–or have a moment of fame. I’ll run the good race, fight the good fight, go for a three-pointer, believe I can win. “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can.”

Rodin’s THE THINKER

“HE SCORES!”

I’ll have to wait, however, in the “the kiss-and-cry area” for my results, maybe not a Perfect 10, but for sure a

Like this:

“Once upon a time…” Sam Keen told and repeated the story of the death of his father. Keen’s world was shattered, he writes, leading to his finding “a new myth by which to live.” He realized that he “had a repertoire of stories within my autobiography that gave me satisfying personal answers about the meaning of my life.”

“Everyone has a fascinating story to tell, an autobiographical myth. And when we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and are healed from our isolation and loneliness.”

“We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and heart.”

[“In a strict sense myth refers to ‘an intricate set of interlocking stories, rituals, rites, and customs that inform and give the pivotal sense of meaning and direction to a person, family, community, or culture.’”]

“The organizing myth of any culture functions in ways that may be either creative or destructive, healthful or pathological. By providing a world picture and a set of stories that explain why things are as they are, it creates consensus, sanctifies the social order, and gives the individual an authorized map of the path of life. A myth creates the plotline that organizes the diverse experiences of a person or community into a single story.”

“Every family, like a miniculture, also has an elaborate system of stories and rituals that differentiate it from other families. … And within the family each member’s place is defined by a series of stories.”

“Each person is a repository of stories. … We gain the full dignity and power of our persons only when we create a narrative account of our lives, dramatize our existence, and forge a coherent personal myth that combines elements of our cultural myth and family myth with unique stories that come from our experience.”

[Santayana: “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”]

“To remain vibrant throughout a lifetime we must always be inventing ourselves, weaving new themes into our life-narratives, remembering our past, re-visioning our future, reauthorizing the myth by which we live.”

“TO BE A PERSON IS TO HAVE A STORY TO TELL. WE BECOME GROUNDED IN THE PRESENT WHEN WE COLOR IN THE OUTLINES OF THE PAST AND THE FUTURE.” –Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey (1973; 1989)